Last Sunday, I was interviewed by Jamie Oastler for the “Steppin’ Off The Edge” podcast. I was surprised that, while I was getting a lot of hits and attention for my Google AppEngine tech posts, Jamie actually wanted to talk about my political ideas – ideas you might kindly describe as idiosyncratic.

Well, why not? Sounds like fun!

So, long story short, here it is.

"Evolution of Adhocracy" on "Steppin' Off The Edge"

We talk about all kinds of things around the concept of the Adhocratic World System, which I introduced in But who will collect the garbage? . It’s pretty long, apologies in advance if you find it tl;dl . But if you can stick with it, I’d love to hear what you think of it.

Thanks Jamie for the opportunity, and for the excellent editing. I was convinced it’d be a great expanse of “duhurhuhr derp derp derp”, but he’s made me sound relatively coherent, which is no small task.

You’ll recall in my initial post that I detected a, well, somewhat suboptimal algorithm, where I was touching the AppEngine datastore on the order of 10^8 times per day? Liz Fong made the comment that “Schlemiel the Painter algorithms are bad”. What? Who’s Schlemiel the painter?

Shlemiel gets a job as a street painter, painting the dotted lines down the middle of the road. On the first day he takes a can of paint out to the road and finishes 300 yards of the road. “That’s pretty good!” says his boss, “you’re a fast worker!” and pays him a kopeck.

The next day Shlemiel only gets 150 yards done. “Well, that’s not nearly as good as yesterday, but you’re still a fast worker. 150 yards is respectable,” and pays him a kopeck.

The next day Shlemiel paints 30 yards of the road. “Only 30!” shouts his boss. “That’s unacceptable! On the first day you did ten times that much work! What’s going on?”

“I can’t help it,” says Shlemiel. “Every day I get farther and farther away from the paint can!”

Is it Schlemiel or Shlemiel? Whichever it is, we need to fire them both.

Now, you’ll recall that this was all academic. AppEngine currently has no way to detect excessive datastore reads, apart from the billing info. So, I made changes to the code to give Schlemiel the flick, then we waited.

Estimated Charges Under New Pricing

The charges below are estimates of what you would be paying once App Engine’s new pricing model goes live. The amounts shown below are for your information only, they are not being charged and therefore do not affect your balance.

* Note this total does not take into account the minimum per-application charge in the new pricing model.

—

Let me just take a moment to say

w00t!!!!!

Oh yeah. It’s w00t, because this, although being a higher number, is one I can afford. I’m out of danger territory.

Anyway, let’s look at this in a little detail. Here’s what Schlemiel was projected to cost me:

Datastore Reads:
$0.70/Million Ops

59.06

0.05

59.01

$41.31

And here’s the post-Schlemiel picture:

Datastore Reads:
$0.70/Million Ops

2.30

0.05

2.25

$1.58

That, people, is a win.

There’s still a decent cost there, $1.58/day is considerable money for a self funded pet project. So where’s that coming from?

Recall I projected there would still be a good chunk of reads being performed by the fix:

1500 * 720 = 1,008,000 datastore reads per day

That’s in the ballpark, and probably accounts for around half of this. I can totally remove this processing with a careful change to my initialization code for the offending objects, and I haven’t done so already purely in the interests of science. So maybe it’s now time to do that.

It does look like there are still a fair chunk of reads happening elsewhere, possibly another bit of algorithm iterating a thousand or so records on every 2 minute cron job run. Odds are that’s also unnecessary. I’ll worry about that later though; I’ll remove the previously mentioned processing first, see how that works out, then take it from there.

But what about Instances, I hear you cry?

Sweet, Sweet Instances

Previously on Point7: <law and order-esque Da Dum!>

If I can get the average instances to 3, I’ll be paying 4 cents X (3-1) X 24 = US$1.92/day . That’s still a chunk more than I’m currently paying, but it’s doable (as long as everything else stays lowish). Cautious optimism!

But what did the data say?

Frontend Instance Hours:
$0.04/Hour

41.31

24.00

17.31

$0.70

Wow, that’s much better! Compare that to my old CPU bill:

CPU Time:
$0.10/CPU hour

12.83

6.50

6.33

$0.64

What did I do? I moved a couple of sliders, and spread my tasks out with a couple of lines of code. That’s pretty tough stuff. No wonder people are bitching & moaning!

I’ve got a few days of billing data now, and it’s all similar, so I’d say it’s a solid result. I actually can’t explain why this is so cheap, it doesn’t appear to match the instance data. Here’s the instance graph:

AppEngine Instances for Syyncc, 7 Days, 10 September 2011

Whatever it is, I’m happy with it.

So I’ve Got That Going For Me Which Is Nice

Not only are the instances right down to super cheap territory, I’m pretty sure I can get the datastore reads down into free territory with just a little more work. It’s all coming up Millhouse.

Just as a fun aside, this post took a little longer than I thought, due to the billing taking a while to come through. Why’d that happen? Because my credit card was maxed out (yeah, that’ll happen!), the weekly payment for AppEngine couldn’t be processed, and so my billing info was frozen until I fixed it. It turns out they give you no more billing info, and don’t let you change your billing settings, until you pay for the thing. Oh the humanity! Well, at least your app doesn’t get turned off, that’s great. Could be a gotcha if you have your billing settings cranked up though!

I’d love an ability to throw a bunch of money in ahead of time, ie: be able to have a positive account that the weekly billing draws from (my credit card is notoriously unreliable). I guess I could implement that by getting a debit card purely for the app. But then I have to think about money and stuff, and that’s boring and awful 😉

What’s it all mean for AppEngine developers?

Straightforwardly, it means this: optimisation isn’t difficult, and you should quit whining and do it. You might learn something.

I know there are some people who are optimised and can’t fix this. Their apps are predicated on using more instances than is financially viable. That’s hard luck.

On the other hand, the vast majority of apps will just be running fat & happy, and can be fixed with a bit of attention. Just do it, it’s not that tough. In fact, if you want a hand, yell out, I’m happy to look at stuff (as long as you’re ok for me to talk about it publicly, anonymity can be preserved to protect the guilty).

I’m a huge fan of not prematurely optimising, absolutely. But premature wont last forever. Here’s my new rule of thumb for AppEngine development:

You get to be willfully stupid or cheap but not both

Bullheaded idiocy is reserved for the rich. The rest of us need to use our brains just a little bit. And then it can be super cheap. So we little guys get a platform which can have longevity, and we get our way paid by wealthy and/or dumb people. I’m good with that.

Where to next?

My app has the exact same scenario as yours – I initiate ~250 URL Fetches every 15 minutes. If I allow multiple front-end instances to get created, all these fetches will occur in parallel, but I’d be paying a lot of money for all these mostly idle instances. My optimization centers around using one single backend that processes these URL fetches one at a time (totally acceptable for my app), by leasing them one at time from a pull queue. The pull queue is populated by random events in a front-end instances, and the back-end is triggered by a cron every 15 minutes to lease these URL Fetch tasks from the pull-queue. This way all my work gets done by a single backend that runs 24×7. I could easily change my cron to run once every hour instead of 15 minutes, and then my backend is running for free (just under 9 instance hours a day).

Another level of optimization is kicking off multiple URL Fetches using create_rpc() calls, so that my backend can do other things while the URL fetch completes (which, like in your case, can take several seconds to complete or timeout). With all this, I hope to stay under the free instance hour quota.

Some people, unlike me, can just say something awesome in a couple of paragraphs without going all tl;dr on it.

Firstly, Rishi has done the backend style optimisation which seemed like the way to go. And what’s that you’re saying, it could run for free? Now you’ve got my attention. That’s worth some thought.

Secondly, what’s this create_rpc() call of which Rishi speaks? Oh, it must be this:

“Asynchronous Requests: A Python app can make an asynchronous request to the URL Fetch service to fetch a URL in the background, while the application code does other things.”

The doco says that you create an rpc object using create_rpc(), then execute it with make_fetch_call(), then finally wait for it to complete with wait() or get_result(). You can have it call a callback function on completion, too (although it requires the call to wait() or get_result() to invoke it).

My code is full of long fetches to external urls. It might be possible to do other things while they execute, with a code restructure. I smell some coding and another blog post in my future.

As I’ve detailed in the previous posts, I’m facing a big Google AppEngine bill for Syyncc, based on the number of running instances. Lots of small developers like me have been struggling with this (and bellowing) but I’m betting that this is in my control, and due to poor suboptimal coding on my part.

In my last attempt at tuning, I managed to drop the average running instances from over 10 to around 5 or 6. Can I do better?

I already identified a likely culprit for the excess instances, which is that I’m kicking off 50 tasks, all at once, every 2 minutes. That kind of spiky load must force the scheduler to keep more instances running than really necessary. It’s more than necessary because I want the tasks done within the 2 minute period, but I don’t care about latency within that.

Now, these tasks are calls to /ssprocessmonitor, which the original post showed as averaging a bit over a second run time. The longest run time I’ve been able to see by checking my logs is about 4 seconds.

If I were to do these processes in a bit of sequential processing (in a backend?) then they’d finish before the two minutes were up, more or less. But I don’t want to go so far as to rearchitect around that. Can I do something simpler?

The problem here is that the tasks are being added to the taskqueue all at once. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a simple way to stagger them, spread them out through the 2 minutes? Let’s look at the doco:

countdown: Minimum time to wait before executing this task, in seconds. Defaults to zero.

Using that, I could spread the tasks out, 2 seconds apart. That means the last one would at best begin 100 seconds after the tasks were scheduled, which still gives it (and any straggling tasks) 20 seconds to complete before this whole process starts again.

There are a lot of better ways to be doing what I’m doing here, but this might at least get me out of a jam.

So how did it go? Here’s the instances graph, see if you can spot where I uploaded the new code:

Instances Graph for Syyncc, 6 September 2011

Is this success? It’s better, a bit up and down. Maybe I need more time to see how it behaves.

Here’s a the view over a four days, so you can see it back when it was really bad, the previous optimisation, then this one.

4 day Instances Graph for Syyncc, 6 September 2011

I’m feeling better about that.

What I’m going to be billed under the new system is:

4 cents / instance hour, less 1 free hour per hour.

So that’s the area under the graph, minus a 1 unit high horizontal strip, times 4 cents.

If I can get the average instances to 3, I’ll be paying 4 cents X (3-1) X 24 = US$1.92/day . That’s still a chunk more than I’m currently paying, but it’s doable (as long as everything else stays lowish). Cautious optimism!

—

Now that’s all great, but there’s something else that I might have been able to use, and without a code change.

Apparently, push queues (ie: what I’m using) can be configured:

You can define any number of individual queues by providing a queue name. You can control the rate at which tasks are processed in each queue by defining other directives, such as rate, bucket_size, and max_concurrent_requests. You can read more about these directives in the Queue Definitions section.

The task queue uses token buckets to control the rate of task execution. Each named queue has a token bucket that holds a certain number of tokens, defined by the bucket_size directive. Each time your application executes a task, it uses a token. Your app continues processing tasks in the queue until the queue’s bucket runs out of tokens. App Engine refills the bucket with new tokens continuously based on the rate that you specified for the queue.

Instances

I’ve set the Max Idle Instances to 1, and Min Pending Latency to 15 seconds. ie: hang it all, don’t start more instances unless the sky is falling in.

Syyncc’s site still seems responsive enough, and the app itself is working as before, I can’t detect any functional difference. But what’s important is that the average instance count has dropped significantly:

Instances Graph for Syyncc, 4 Sep 2011

It’s dropped to 4 or 5 instances average, rather than 10 to 15 that it’s normally at. Not bad for shoving a couple of sliders around! And that’s without what will be necessary code changes, to stop the behaviour where the 50 tasks are scheduled concurrently once every 2 mins. That leads to a spike in activity, then nothing for most of the time, and is very likely the cause of excess idle instances. That’s all detailed in the previous post, linked at the top.

Given that the impact from the performance tuning is obvious, I’ll go ahead with refactoring the bursty scheduling code in the next few days, and post the results of that.

A bit more detail:

Instances Detail for Syyncc, 4 September 2011

Not quite good enough (I want to get down to under 2 average), but much better.

Datastore Reads

You’ll recall from the previous article I had the horrible code full of fetches with offsets. I’ve replaced it with this:

So that’s a simple iteration through the query that should behave much better; the debug line says

D2011-09-04 23:19:24.189 SetAllNextChecks processed 1403 monitors

and I’m fairly sure that this is actually accurate (ie: it’s not actually touching over 100,000 objects!)

There’s no way to tell if it’s helping at the moment, Datastore Reads are only surfaced in the billing, and the billing lags a few days behind. So, I’ll report back midweek or so with results of this change.

It’s a start

That’s it for now. Some preliminary success, but I’ve got a way to go. Stay tuned for the next update in a few days.

In my last post, I talked about my use of AppEngine, my boosting of AppEngine as a business platform, and some of the changes as it leaves preview. But I left out the big change, the changes to pricing.

Beat Me With Your Billing Stick

The price changes were announced a few months ago, and I remember an outcry then. I just ignored it, I figured that hey, it wont be so bad, my app doesn’t do much, it’ll be cool. But now Google has released a comparison tool in the AppEngine billing history page, so you can see what you would be billed right now if the new system was already in place.

Estimated Charges Under New Pricing

The charges below are estimates of what you would be paying once App Engine’s new pricing model goes live. The amounts shown below are for your information only, they are not being charged and therefore do not affect your balance.

* Note this total does not take into account the minimum per-application charge in the new pricing model.

So what’s the take home message here?

Old price for one day: $0.51
New price for one day: $49.92

ie: my pricing has increased by two orders of magnitude.

And, that’s a pretty cheap day. Many other days I looked at were over $60 under the new scheme.

So, instead of being in the vicinity of $200/year, I’m looking at $20,000/year.

Is it time to panic?

Not just yet. You see, there’s some interesting stuff in those numbers.

Firstly, most stuff has stayed the same. The bandwidth costs have stayed negligible. There are lots of zeroes where there were zeroes before.

In fact there are only two numbers of concern. Admitedly they are *very* worrying, but still, only two.

Frontend Instance Hours

This is one I was expecting, one that’s been getting a lot of press. Google AppEngine has removed CPU based billing and replaced it with Instance based billing. CPU based billing meant you only paid while your app was doing work. Instance based billing means you pay for work your app does, and time that the app is waiting for something to happen, and for the amount of idle capacity being held ready in reserve for your app.

It turns out that my app was using 11.39 CPU Hours per day, and 231.13 Instance hours per day. So that change is somewhat bad for me!

Here’s a picture:

AppEngine Instance Usage for Syyncc for 2 September 2011

The orange line is active instances (ie: actually in use). The blue line is total instances (ie: adding in idle instances waiting around to do something). While the total instances seems to average somewhere between 10 and 15 at any time, the active instances looks to average less than 1. ie: there’s a lot of wasted capacity.

Here’s some more detail, from the AppEngine console’s Instances page:

Detailed Instance Data for Syyncc for 3 Sep 2011

From this page I can see Syyncc is servicing roughly one query per second. That’s like one person hitting a web page per second. A decent load, but not a killer. However, those instances are serious overkill for a load like that!

Where does all that load come from? Let’s look at the current load:

GAE Current Load for Syyncc, 3 Sep 2011

I was worried that the Rudimentary Google+ API that I put up a little while back was causing the load, but looking at this, it’s not a big deal (it’s /gpapi). The real requests are from /ssprocessmonitor (a piece of Syyncc’s monitoring of social networks which evidently runs every 2 seconds at the moment, for over a second per run), and socialsyncprocessing2, the “main loop” of syyncc which kicks off all other tasks, which runs as a cron job once every 2 mins, but runs for over 20 seconds at a time! Also, /ssweb-fbevents is worth a look, running on average over once per minute; its job is to receive incoming notifications from Facebook that a user has made a new post or comment. It’s not too bad though.

This fairly clearly tells me what’s using the most CPU time, but it’s not clear to me what is causing such a high amount of idle instances to stay running.

“This scaling helps ensure that all of your application’s current instances are being used to optimal efficiency and cost effectiveness.”

made me say “orly???”

Anyway, the gist seems to be that more instances start when tasks (ie: some kind of request to a url resource) seem to be waiting too long in existing instance queues. So the key to me bringing the instance cost down is to figure out how to reduce that wait time, I guess. Or, maybe there’s some more direct control I can take of the instance management?

Reading the google doco on this, http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/performancesettings.html, there are indeed two settings I can use. Firstly, I can set “Maximum number of idle instances”, which stops the app using more than this number of idle instances in anticipation of future work. It looks to me like I could set that to 1 or 2, and that would be a vast improvement on, say, 10 which the default “automatic” settings seems to be deciding on. Secondly, Minimum Pending Latency (which seems to be what causes the infrastructure to claim more instances) could be a lot higher. Remember that most of Syync’s load comes from itself, not from external users. So, being less responsive should be totally acceptable (no one can see that anyway). So, huge potential here, for cutting the cost down without a single code change.

If code changes are needed, perhaps I could write Syyncc to kick off less parallel tasks? Looking at this code in /socialsyncprocessing2 which runs every 2 mins:

What’s that doing? Well, it’s grabbing 50 monitors (ie: things that monitor one social network for one user) that are overdue to be checked, and it’s scheduling an AppEngine task to check each of them (that’s what /ssprocessmonitor does). There’s something bad about this loop in that it instrinsically doesn’t scale (once there are too many users to handle with 50 checks/2 seconds, syyncc will slow down).

But what’s worse, is that once every 2 mins, Syyncc says to AppEngine “Here, quick, do these 50 things RIGHT NOW”. AppEngine’s default rules are all around being a webserver, so it’s saying, crucially, if any tasks have to wait too long (ie: their pending latency gets too high), then kick off another instance to help service them. How long is the “automatic” minimum pending latency? I don’t know, but it can’t be much more than a second or two, going on the latency settings in my instances data.

So AppEngine kicks off an new instance, then another, but there are still heaps of tasks waiting, waiting! Oh no! Kick off more! And I’m guessing for syync it hits the 10 to 15 instances mark before it gets through all those tasks. Phew!

And then, nothing happens for another minute or so. Meanwhile, all those instances just sit there. It probably starts thinking about timing them out, shutting them down, when /ssprocessmonitor runs again and says “Here, quick, do these 50 things RIGHT NOW” again! And so on. And so the very high number of idle instances.

So changing my code to not schedule a batch of concurrent work every couple of minutes would be a good thing!

Long story short here, I’ve got options. I can probably fix this instances issue. I’ll try some stuff, and blog about the results. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, there’s a much, much bigger issue:

Datastore Reads

What’s a datastore read? It seems to mean any time you touch, or cause AppEngine to touch, an object in the apps’ datastore. Mundane stuff. But let’s look at what the new billing scheme says:

Datastore Reads:
$0.70/Million Ops

59.06

0.05

59.01

$41.31

The first three numbers are Used, Free and Billable, in units of millions of ops, and the last is the price (Billable * $0.70/Million Ops). Per day. Ouch!

Now this never used to be part of the quota, and in fact I know of no other way to even know your stats here except for the new billing tool. So, it’s a total surprise, and it’s very difficult to find out much about it.

First up, reality check: My app is doing something in the vicinity of 60 Million operations on the datastore per day. REALLY!!??!?!?! But actually, it’s probably true.

Let’s think about Syyncc’s datastore. There are a bunch of different entity types in there, some with around 3000 entities in them. And then, there is SSItemMark.

SSItemMark Stats for Syyncc, 3 Sep 2011

An Item Mark (which is what SSItemMark entities are) is a relationship between one post in one social network (say Facebook) and another in another network (Google+), or between a comment in one network and a comment in another. When Syyncc cross-posts or cross-comments, it saves an Item Mark to link the original post/comment and the new one Syyncc has created. If you have 3 networks set up, Syyncc creates 2 marks, if you have 4, Syyncc creates 3 marks.

Syyncc has no method of deleting old marks, I’ve never bothered with it. I’m below the paid quota for storage, and it just hasn’t mattered till now, why not just hang onto them?

So, there are currently over 300,000 of them, as is shown above.

But 300,000 is a lot less than 60,000,000. What’s the deal?

Maybe something I’m doing with my queries is touching a goodly subset of these objects every time I do a query. It could be something in /ssprocessmonitor, which is happening once every couple of seconds. If that were true, we’d have:

Say there’s only one query responsible, so K2 == 1, then K1 is approx 0.0046

ie: I only have to be touching a small subset of those records every couple of seconds for things to get crazily out of control.

OTOH, inspecting the code, it doesn’t look like this is the case. I use fetches on the Item Marks, but they should only ever return 1 object at a time, and I never iterate them. It’s possible that my use of fetches behaves differently to what I expect, but I don’t think so. I don’t think SSItemMark is causing this issue.

Let’s look at the fetch() call, because this is the one that’s got the potential to be the culprit. I use them extensively to get data, and it turns out there’s a big gotcha!

fetch(limit, offset=0) Executes the query, then returns the results. The limit and offset arguments control how many results are fetched from the datastore, and how many are returned by the fetch() method:

The datastore fetches offset + limit results to the application. The first offset results are not skipped by the datastore itself.

The fetch() method skips the first offset results, then returns the rest (limit results).

The query has performance characteristics that correspond linearly with the offset amount plus the limit.

Arguments:

limit

The number of results to return. Fewer than limit results may be returned if not enough results are available that meet the criteria.

limit is a required argument. To get every result from a query when the number of results is unknown, use the Query object as an iterable instead of using the fetch() method.

The return value is a list of model instances or keys, possibly an empty list.

So, paging through records using limit and offset is incredibly prone to blowing out the number of datastore reads; the offset doesn’t mean you start somewhere in the list, it means you skip (ie: visit and ignore) every object before reaching the offset. It’s easy to see how this could lead to the 60,000,000 data store reads/day that I’m experiencing.

Another look at the code for /socialsyncprocessing2 gives this:

class SocialSyncProcessingHandler2(webapp.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
# any records with a null nextcheck are given one making them overdue
SSMonitorBase.SetAllNextChecks()
# ... and the rest ...

The way /socialsyncprocessing2 works, as we saw in the previous section, is to get up to 50 overdue monitors and process them. We know they’re overdue because there is a NextCheck field that has a date in it signifying when the monitor next needs checking. But sometimes, especially for new signups, the NextCheck is not set. So, I threw in SetAllNextChecks() to make sure there’s a value in all the monitors before they are checked. Wait, it checks all of them? Let’s look at that code:

There are about 1500 SSMonitorBase objects (ie: monitors). Most of these are enabled, let’s just assume they all are for now. The code above loops through them all, and any without a NextCheck set get a date in the past plugged in (which makes them overdue).

Ok, fine. Except, look at that evil loop. It uses fetch() to get 10 objects at a time, processes 10, then gets 10 more, until it gets through all 1500. And it does that by using amount and offset.

So, looking at the doco above, the loop will touch the first 10 objects. Then it’ll touch the first 10 again to get to the next 10 (so 20). Then it’ll touch the first 20 again to get to the 10 after that (that’s 30 more), and so on all the way to 1500. If the amount was 1 instead of 10, the formula N * (N-1) / 2 would give the number of accesses. With amount 10, it’s approx N * (N-1) / 20 .

1500 x (1500 -1) / 20 = 112425 datastore reads

Ok. That seems, you know, excessive.

Now consider that this happens every 2 minutes. That is, 30 times per hour, or 720 times per day.

112425 * 720 = 80,946,000 datastore reads per day.

Now that’s a few too many (what’s 20 million reads between friends?) but if we assume some of the monitors are not enabled, that’ll be dead on. It’s got to be the culprit.

That also tells me that it’s unlikely that anything else is doing excessive reading. This should account for the entire issue. Good news, no?

Now if I were to rewrite the above to just iterate on the query, and not use fetches, the number would be:

1500 * 720 = 1,008,000 datastore reads per day

which would be about 70 cents per day. Even better, it’d be an O(N) operation instead of O(N^2), so it’s not going to get wildly out of hand.

But even better than that, if I were to fix the rest of the code (particularly new user signup) so that this field is never None, I could dispense with this operation altogether. That’s the best solution, because frankly this operation is total crap. I could run it as a backstop once per day, maybe, but really I shouldn’t need it.

Wow, Solved?

Well, maybe. It’s looking good, isn’t it? If I can limit the number of idle instances to something really low, and if I can get rid of the expensive and wasteful SetAllNextChecks(), the billing should come all the way back down to where it is now. w00t!

But, I can’t be sure of that. I’ll go do it, and report back. Thanks for reading, and tune in next time to see how it goes…

I haven’t written much on my blog about my main personal software project, Syyncc. Syyncc, an AppEngine app, is my service for crossing posts and comments automatically between multiple social networks (originally Facebook, Buzz, now one way support for Google+ which will be full support when the API is released, and crappy broken support for WordPress, which I really must sort out).

(btw, Syyncc is in the process of getting a branding facelift, and becoming Angry Squid. But that’s for another post).

I built Syyncc to solve my own problem with social networks, which was that I felt stuck inside one network at a time. To use more than one network, you have to post across them all, then you have fragmented conversations, each in its own silo. Syyncc fixes this, by monitoring all your networks, moving public posts from one to all the others, then moving all comments made on that post, in whatever network, to all the other networks.

It’s a cool technology that I just built for myself. However, as soon as it existed, other people started asking me “how are you doing that, can I do that?” So I opened it up for anyone to use, sort of went into production by accident, and since then I’ve been on this crazy rollercoaster, dealing with a system with hundreds of users, and everything that goes with that.

Now I’m funding this out of my own pocket, and I’m pretty cheap. So very early on (really before Syyncc in fact), I spotted Google’s AppEngine; a high level Platform-as-a-service (PAAS), which I could use for free (as long as I stayed under the free quotas). I started teaching myself how to use the platform, and immediately had the idea of using it as a platform for monitoring other systems, and moving information around; the first thing I built was an RSS/Atom to Email service (which is hosted at http://www.productx.net), which I use for my newsfeeds. I’ve never been a Google Reader user, but I’m a gmailaholic, so this is still how I read newsfeeds. That service incidentally has some interesting stuff to it; terrible web design (apologies for the clouds!) but a model where you don’t need to log in in any way, the whole authentication mechanism is based on emails. Quite a few people use it (I’m not sure how many, it’s not really instrumented).

Anyway, ah yes, AppEngine. I’ve been amazed by the excellence of AppEngine. When I first saw it, I thought it was an incredibly compelling platform for small to medium enterprise development. Sure, there’s lock-in, and there was no guarantee that Google wouldn’t just shut it down (it was in “preview” status after all). But, it offered such an incredible effort multiplier (by providing all this high level, scalable platform that you don’t have to build or install or administrate yourself), that it was probably worth the risk, and then some.

And now with coming up on a couple of years experience with it, I’m satisfied that it’s a solid platform, a reliable platform. It’s been working spectacularly well for Syyncc, with very little down time (and certainly orders of magnitude less than I would have experienced if I were running my own equipment, because I’m a shitty admin, just like everyone else who isn’t a professional systems administrator). In fact, I’m convinced that Syyncc wouldn’t exist if I’d had the extra burden and cost of running my own equipment; I just wouldn’t have gotten it off the ground.

So I’ve been boosting it as a platform. I believe the experience for small companies moving from their own infrastructure (eg: LAMP on Linux, or IIS/.net on Windows), to AppEngine, will be like that of moving from hosting their own email to using gmail. You get to shed a bunch of worries and expense (machines, people supporting servers, infrastructural concerns) and get a much more dependable platform. You might lose service for a few hours a couple of times a year, but, in email, you’re comparing that to the average SME experience of running MS Exchange, which is that you have problems maybe every couple of weeks, email always seems to be going down, people lose email, people can’t get email remotely, etc etc etc. In developing and running bespoke web apps, you’re comparing maybe losing service for a few hours a few times a year, to the common experience of having running infrastructural issues causing outages on an ongoing basis (reboot the server!), file permission issues, issues with backups, hassle and expense and flakiness and the occasional catastrophic screw up (“um did I really just type “rm -rf *” ??” ) that kills you for days or even weeks.

The most recent example of this is that, in my new job at Ecampus, I’ve pushed for us to use AppEngine for new development. The company is about to begin building a lot of new interesting online apps, with an experimental element to a lot of the work, certainly with a need to be agile, and respond to changes in the company’s business direction as they emerge. I believe AppEngine is the best platform available to support the kind of rapid, agile work that we’ll be doing, so we’re jumping boots-first into it.

Now obviously this has been a scary path to take. Particularly, there have been no guarantees about the longevity of the platform. However, at Google I/O this year they announced that AppEngine would shortly be leaving preview status, and would gain some critical new guarantees – particularly a 99.95% uptime, and a 3 year deprecation policy. Which has now happened.

Since that announcement there’s been a surge of interest regarding business use of AppEngine. It’s suddenly something you can invest real time and money in. I’m not reading much about it, but I’m noticing personal contacts starting to talk about it in a business context, asking questions about viability. It’s on the map.

But something else has changed, and that’s the price. And it’s no small change.

But read more about that in my next post, “The Amazing Story Of Appengine And The Two Orders Of Magnitude”.